I am looking to reinstall Fedora after not liking the vanilla Fedora desktop that much. I am thinking KDE Fedora as that seems to have nice alt-tabbing and good desktop zoom. As long as it doesn’t have any awful memory leak bugs like Kubuntu 18.04 it should be ok for me.
Some questions:
How do I set up /home on a separate partition? I would like to have that separate so I don’t lose it while doing OS upgrades or trying a different desktop.
What size should I give the OS partition? I have 1.2 Tb to spare for the total. (The other .8Tb is allocated to Microsoft windows which will likely not get used much but will keep it in case.)
Easily done by doing the ‘custom’ or ‘advanced custom’ partitioning during installation. I always do the same on the machines I use long term. IMHO that is best done by not using the default btrfs file system for /home though.
The OS really needs very little, depending upon the apps you will be using. Over several years and a lot of apps (some of which are seldom used) my OS has grown to about 50 GB. /home has grown to over 4TB though with all my media files.
Also note. When dual booting on a single drive it is simplest to use the existing efi partition since fedora shares that very nicely with the already installed windows.
As a first step, make the backup of your home dir, e.g., to an external media (USB drive, network share, etc). Note - do not forget to backup your hidden files and directories. Then, start Fedora KDE install, for disk partitioning choose graphical tool (under Installation Destination section). Remove all partitions and create new ones. I use the following method:
512MiB partition for EFI, mount point /boot/efi
1GB EXT4 partition for boot, mount point /boot
LUKS partition (remaining of the disk) for encryption, then inside LUKS:
**32-48 GB EXT4 partition for root, mount point /
**Remaining of LUKS partition - EXT4 partition for home, mount point /home
Note: I use EXT4 as FS for my installs, if you want BTRFS - choose FS type for partitions accordingly and for partitions inside LUKS you can choose BTRFS subvolumes for root and home.
After installation is finished - restore your home dir from external media by copying all (important - including hidden) files and folders back.
Disclaimer - sure, there are numerous other ways to achieve same goal, I just shared mine.
I create 2 user accounts — the one I use and another reserved for cases where the account I use has a problem. Both have doas privileges. I use the “troubleshooting account” to copy the directory for the account to another partition or drive and then make a symbolic link to /home/.